Given our biological inheritance i think that we need to be more tolerant of ourselves and more tolerant and compassionate in our dealings with others. The standards we have for human behavior are at times noble, but at times quite absurd. We're genetically designed to be lustful, aggressive, gregarious, productive creatures, and it can be a good thing to hold ourselves to high community standards of behavior, but we need to deal with ourselves as who and what we are, not just what we think we're supposed to be. The last thing in the world that we need to do is judge and condemn each other. I can understand locking someone up if they're violent, but I can't understand judging that person without compassion and tolerance. If you have a five year old child that likes to kick cats you don't abuse him and lock him in the basement and tell him what a horrible person he is. Obvious you talk to the child and try to get him to figure out why kicking cats is not such a great thing to do. And you recognize that he's kicking cats not because he hates cats, but because he's expressing something that he feels and can't otherwise express. Abuse begets abuse, compassion begets compassion. I'm not advocating a soft approach to criminal, violent, or anti-social behavior, rather i'm advocating an enlightened and realistic approach to our human-ness. Locking a criminal up in a horrible place and making them feel like shit is neither a compassionate nor a culturally expedient way to deal with the situation. It's also not taking in to account the fact that we're essentially guilty of the same things. If i had been brought up in a different environment that was abusive and only reinforced violent and aggression i'm sure that i would have turned out differently. So how can i condemn someone and judge someone who was raised differently from me? I can, with justification, prevent someone from hurting someone else, but i can't comprehensively condemn them from it. Were all saddled with a violent biological and cultural legacy. It's just that some of us have the skills and upbringing to deal with it.
In most cases people just aren't aware of the effects of their actions. You can't take a creature who has spent the last couple of million years reproducing and fighting and living a short and difficult life and then plop them in a suburb and ask them to enter data into a cpu and expect them to be well adjusted and fine. We're suppose to be out chasing and being chased eating and being eaten. Nothing in our genetic lineage have prepared us for most of what we deal with on a day to day basis. If you took a penguin from Antarctica and put him in a corn field in Mexico would you be surprised if he got sick and died? Same thing with us humans. For the last million years we're for the most part, lived in tight communities and led urgent and vital lives. We're not designed to be slothful and indolent suburbanites.
I'm not advocating a rejection of modern convinces, but i am advocating an acceptance of what we've inherited and what we are as biological humans. Christ took pity on us and had compassion for us, so why can't we try to have understanding & compassion for ourselves and each other? ~Moby~
